7 ms·

It's kind of my point: LISP does (mostly) provide instant feedback, but it's not used much in the real world (every big LISP success I've heard of wound up eith

by kabdib 9y ago

It's kind of my point: LISP does (mostly) provide instant feedback, but it's not used much in the real world (every big LISP success I've heard of wound up either being translated into a shlub language, or resulted in the teams using it having a really hard time hiring people and scaling).

didibus 9y ago
Ya, I think that's just the familiarity hump. Most people don't get over it, and the few that did geek out too much about the possibility of infinite macros, and how you could extend Lisp, while eventually realising how few made it past the familiarity hump and starting to feel isolated they eventually move to something else. It's hard to break this habit of familiarity, it's self replicating, because the less familiar people are, the less likely they can have good teachers and teaching material about it, etc.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
  I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators. Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style? >Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference. Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).
    - zem 9y ago
      people's exposure to infix operators way precedes any dabbling with an algol language; it's the common notation that everyday mathematics has settled upon. you learn it in school.
    - SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
      >Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. BZZZZT! Wrong answer! I started with BASIC and transitioned from there to assembly language. Wrote several games and device drivers in assembly language (BASIC was too slow) and then learned Forth. Tried really hard to like Forth, and played with it for a while; loved some aspects of the language, but couldn't wrap my head around how to write a game with it, so I gave up and kept writing games in assembly language. Pascal was my next language, and that wasn't until later. Much later than that I finally got to C. You might think of BASIC as Algol-like, though I'd say it's more Fortran-like. Assembly language, though, is about un-Algol as a language can be, as is Forth.
  - didibus 9y ago
    Some would go to fight with a Long Sword, others would prefer a Katana. I think that's fine. Master what works best for the way your mind and body works. That said, I'd hate for languages to adopt a lowest common denominator just so companies feel then that all programmers can replace any other and all code base is understandable by all. That would be like having every sword fighter fight with a knife. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is. I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Like I said, its possible the style doesn't bode with ya, and that's cool. That said, here's my anecdote. I also did Lisp in college and hated it. Thought it was stupid, had the worst most unreadable syntax I'd ever seen. It made every trivial thing hard, like why can't I just loop?!?, where are the variables?!?, how do I just do one thing followed by another?!?. Where do things start and end?!? I don't even remember what Lisp it was, but trust me, it was some academic cryptic variant, probably maintained by some teacher himself, had no library ecosystem, lacked documentation, the ugliest editor I'd ever seen. Anyways, moved on and never thought of it again. Then became a dev, did C++, some assembly, moved to ActionScript 3 lots of event programming, then C#, JavaScript, Java, all that. Suddenly, I gave Lisp another shot, at work, on a real project, not some school project, with Clojure. First thing I realized, there are libraries and documentation, and frameworks, you can set variables, loop, do infix even if you want too. There's easy ways to do imperative code, OOP, all that is there, I just couldn't see it before, I think it was college shadowing the obvious from me, and maybe my coding instincts weren't good enough then, so I couldn't recognise things if they looked and behaved slightly differently. Also, I had coworkers who used Lisp for real projects, commercially. I realised Lisps are often used in school for teaching theoretical programming concepts. But in practice, you'd not use Lisps like that, you'd use it like any other language. Anyways, eventually, I also got recursion, tail call, collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions and all that. Once I got all these things, it was like, how have I had been using anything else before. Now its such a drag to go back.
    - SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
      >I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. Like our pg? Who loves Lisp to death, and made his first major app (a web page store generator, if I recall) in Lisp? But then after selling it to Yahoo -- ported it to another language (Python?) so that other developers could actually modify it? It's not "lowest common denominator" to expect a language to stay within certain bounds of flexibility. If every single project has so many macros that it's effectively a DSL that no other programmer anywhere understands, then you've created a software package that becomes instantly unmaintainable if the wrong people get hit by a bus. In college, by the time I picked up Lisp, I had already used: * Assembly Language * Basic * Pascal * Forth * C++ * Recursion And I'd already worked on video games professionally (in 1987, in a project for Lucasfilm Games, before they became LucasArts). Java and C# had yet to be invented. At the time, there weren't libraries and documentation to speak of in any Lisp, so that's something. It was Common Lisp (as well as "elisp" on the Atari ST, which of course was completely incompatible...). Since then, I've used tail calls (in Lua, and soon coming to JavaScript), collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions, and all that, in many other languages. I just still hate Lisp, and while I have no problem understanding how to use Lisp, I don't see the advantage of using it over using other languages, and in particular I am finding static types to be critical in large system architecture, which are completely lacking in Clojure and other Lisps.
- btilly 9y ago
  Speaking personally, I don't want to work with an image based language. That's an argument against both Lisp and Smalltalk. The problem with image based languages is that you've thrown away your file-based tool system. You're so used to your favorite text editor, source control system, etc? So sorry, we're building better tools! And when your code is ready, you just deploy the image! It sounds great in theory, once those tools are delivered, but in practice you've lost more than you gained. No matter how good your environment, you do not beat the collective effort and productivity of file-system based tools. What I say about image based tools also applies to code deployed in a database. Good luck keeping source control in sync with stored procedures...
  - didibus 9y ago
    Fair enough, but not all Lisps are image based. Clojure is file based. That's the one I use.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - open_bear 9y ago
    > No matter how good your environment, you do not beat the collective effort and productivity of file-system based tools. I bet people said the same about trains and ships. There was a lot of work put into horse-powered infrastructure and first cars and trains were very slow and bad. Same with boats: at the time steam-powered ships were created wind-powered clippers were 5 times faster and much more reliable.
    - btilly 9y ago
      The difference here is that image based languages have been making the argument that their better will beat every one else's larger community for decades. The one that came closest to realizing the dream was Smalltalk. But somehow it never happened.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >The problem with image based languages is that you've thrown away your file-based tool system. You're so used to your favorite text editor, source control system, etc? So sorry, we're building better tools! And when your code is ready, you just deploy the image! First, what's bad about that? Our text editors and source control systems are indeed crap compared to what we could get with image based systems with inherent (not text-level) knowledge of code. The only real argument is that we still need to work with legacy crap text-based languages also, which can't share those tools. But that's not really an argument against those tools being good in themselves. Second, there's nothing about an "image based language" that says you can't also have a textual representation, and thus work with your editor (or the image based editor) and "regular" SCM tools. Third, LISPs are generally not image based.

by kabdib 9y ago

didibus 9y ago

Ya, I think that's just the familiarity hump. Most people don't get over it, and the few that did geek out too much about the possibility of infinite macros, and how you could extend Lisp, while eventually realising how few made it past the familiarity hump and starting to feel isolated they eventually move to something else. It's hard to break this habit of familiarity, it's self replicating, because the less familiar people are, the less likely they can have good teachers and teaching material about it, etc.

SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators. Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Some people (myself included) don't like the aesthetics of Lisp as a language, nor do we like the enforced functional program structure, nor do we like the lack of infix operators Is it that "Some people" don't like those, or that "some people" have been to Algol-style languages first, and they can't easily adapt to the other style? >Maybe I "didn't have good enough teachers," but for every other language I've ever learned I didn't need those "good teachers" to achieve a strong level of mastery, and I've learned more than a dozen to a high level of mastery. Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. After that, adding other languages does not mean much if they all share the same paradigms and syntax style. It's like a Common Lisp person also learning Scheme, Racket, Clojure etc -- in the end it's not much difference. Going from those to different paradigms is what makes an actual difference (e.g. learning Coq, or Erlang, or Haskell, or Lisp or Forth, etc).
  - zem 9y ago
    people's exposure to infix operators way precedes any dabbling with an algol language; it's the common notation that everyday mathematics has settled upon. you learn it in school.
  - SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
    >Yes, but I bet the first one's you've learned were already algol-like. BZZZZT! Wrong answer! I started with BASIC and transitioned from there to assembly language. Wrote several games and device drivers in assembly language (BASIC was too slow) and then learned Forth. Tried really hard to like Forth, and played with it for a while; loved some aspects of the language, but couldn't wrap my head around how to write a game with it, so I gave up and kept writing games in assembly language. Pascal was my next language, and that wasn't until later. Much later than that I finally got to C. You might think of BASIC as Algol-like, though I'd say it's more Fortran-like. Assembly language, though, is about un-Algol as a language can be, as is Forth.
- didibus 9y ago
  Some would go to fight with a Long Sword, others would prefer a Katana. I think that's fine. Master what works best for the way your mind and body works. That said, I'd hate for languages to adopt a lowest common denominator just so companies feel then that all programmers can replace any other and all code base is understandable by all. That would be like having every sword fighter fight with a knife. After a while you have to stop blaming the people and instead just admit that Lisp isn't as awesome-for-all-purposes as some famous people seem to think it is. I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. I spent months working on a Lisp project in college. I pretty much hated it. Like I said, its possible the style doesn't bode with ya, and that's cool. That said, here's my anecdote. I also did Lisp in college and hated it. Thought it was stupid, had the worst most unreadable syntax I'd ever seen. It made every trivial thing hard, like why can't I just loop?!?, where are the variables?!?, how do I just do one thing followed by another?!?. Where do things start and end?!? I don't even remember what Lisp it was, but trust me, it was some academic cryptic variant, probably maintained by some teacher himself, had no library ecosystem, lacked documentation, the ugliest editor I'd ever seen. Anyways, moved on and never thought of it again. Then became a dev, did C++, some assembly, moved to ActionScript 3 lots of event programming, then C#, JavaScript, Java, all that. Suddenly, I gave Lisp another shot, at work, on a real project, not some school project, with Clojure. First thing I realized, there are libraries and documentation, and frameworks, you can set variables, loop, do infix even if you want too. There's easy ways to do imperative code, OOP, all that is there, I just couldn't see it before, I think it was college shadowing the obvious from me, and maybe my coding instincts weren't good enough then, so I couldn't recognise things if they looked and behaved slightly differently. Also, I had coworkers who used Lisp for real projects, commercially. I realised Lisps are often used in school for teaching theoretical programming concepts. But in practice, you'd not use Lisps like that, you'd use it like any other language. Anyways, eventually, I also got recursion, tail call, collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions and all that. Once I got all these things, it was like, how have I had been using anything else before. Now its such a drag to go back.
  - SomeCallMeTim 9y ago
    >I don't know, sounds like it's just not as awesome for you, but probably is that awesome to all those famous people saying it is. Like our pg? Who loves Lisp to death, and made his first major app (a web page store generator, if I recall) in Lisp? But then after selling it to Yahoo -- ported it to another language (Python?) so that other developers could actually modify it? It's not "lowest common denominator" to expect a language to stay within certain bounds of flexibility. If every single project has so many macros that it's effectively a DSL that no other programmer anywhere understands, then you've created a software package that becomes instantly unmaintainable if the wrong people get hit by a bus. In college, by the time I picked up Lisp, I had already used: * Assembly Language * Basic * Pascal * Forth * C++ * Recursion And I'd already worked on video games professionally (in 1987, in a project for Lucasfilm Games, before they became LucasArts). Java and C# had yet to be invented. At the time, there weren't libraries and documentation to speak of in any Lisp, so that's something. It was Common Lisp (as well as "elisp" on the Atari ST, which of course was completely incompatible...). Since then, I've used tail calls (in Lua, and soon coming to JavaScript), collection mappings, pure functions, higher order functions, and all that, in many other languages. I just still hate Lisp, and while I have no problem understanding how to use Lisp, I don't see the advantage of using it over using other languages, and in particular I am finding static types to be critical in large system architecture, which are completely lacking in Clojure and other Lisps.
btilly 9y ago
Speaking personally, I don't want to work with an image based language. That's an argument against both Lisp and Smalltalk. The problem with image based languages is that you've thrown away your file-based tool system. You're so used to your favorite text editor, source control system, etc? So sorry, we're building better tools! And when your code is ready, you just deploy the image! It sounds great in theory, once those tools are delivered, but in practice you've lost more than you gained. No matter how good your environment, you do not beat the collective effort and productivity of file-system based tools. What I say about image based tools also applies to code deployed in a database. Good luck keeping source control in sync with stored procedures...
- didibus 9y ago
  Fair enough, but not all Lisps are image based. Clojure is file based. That's the one I use.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- open_bear 9y ago
  > No matter how good your environment, you do not beat the collective effort and productivity of file-system based tools. I bet people said the same about trains and ships. There was a lot of work put into horse-powered infrastructure and first cars and trains were very slow and bad. Same with boats: at the time steam-powered ships were created wind-powered clippers were 5 times faster and much more reliable.
  - btilly 9y ago
    The difference here is that image based languages have been making the argument that their better will beat every one else's larger community for decades. The one that came closest to realizing the dream was Smalltalk. But somehow it never happened.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The problem with image based languages is that you've thrown away your file-based tool system. You're so used to your favorite text editor, source control system, etc? So sorry, we're building better tools! And when your code is ready, you just deploy the image! First, what's bad about that? Our text editors and source control systems are indeed crap compared to what we could get with image based systems with inherent (not text-level) knowledge of code. The only real argument is that we still need to work with legacy crap text-based languages also, which can't share those tools. But that's not really an argument against those tools being good in themselves. Second, there's nothing about an "image based language" that says you can't also have a textual representation, and thus work with your editor (or the image based editor) and "regular" SCM tools. Third, LISPs are generally not image based.